Who Will Get Blamed for What?

The future controversy on past policy toward Tehran

Even as President Carter struggled to resolve the Iranian crisis, his defenders and critics last week began what almost surely will become a protracted controversy over the events that led to the takeover of the embassy in Tehran--and what the U.S. might have done, if anything, to prevent it. Some experts on Iran in the academic world believe the first mistake of the Carter Administration was failing to understand the basic nature of the movement that swept the Ayatullah Khomeini into power. Following the policies of preceding administrations, Carter originally supported the Shah, seeing him as a stabilizing ally in the Persian Gulf region, and not realizing how widely he was hated by his subjects. Carter first thought the Shah could suppress the mounting demonstrations, then, when events got totally out of hand, abandoned him to his fate. The Shah has told friends, bitterly, that right to the end he expected more assistance from the U.S. Says Richard Falk, professor of international law and practice at Princeton University: "We really didn't appreciate what was happening in Iran, and we didn't appreciate the degree to which Iranians regarded the Shah as our contribution to their suffering."

Once the Ayatullah had come into power, the Carter Administration adopted what it felt was a moderate and cooperative course of action toward the new regime, maintaining food sales and supplying spare parts for military equipment. There are those who fault this policy not only with the traditionalist argument that we were kowtowing to rebels, but also on the ground that we were again misunderstanding Iranian society. Says Sepehr Zabith, a research associate at the Institutes of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley: "Each of the measures of accommodation that the U.S. took was viewed in Iran as a sign of weakness and of desperation. They served to embolden Khomeini, and the net result was that Khomeini was reinforced in his belief that he could impose his terms on the U.S."

That seems too stern a view, however. After years of more or less ignoring the oppressions of the Shah, the U.S. had good reasons--including the familiar strategic and economic ones--to develop friendly relations with the new Iranian regime.

Perhaps the trickiest question about U.S. policy is whether or not the Administration should have allowed the Shah to come to New York, the act that brought about the seizure of the American embassy. This was a serious Carter mistake, believes Richard Bulliet, a member of Columbia University's Middle East Institute, who thinks the decision reinforced Iranians' fears that the U.S. planned to restore the Shah to power, as it did in 1953. Says he: "Those currently running Iran could only interpret the decision as hostile. The admission of the Shah to this country sort of confirms the notion that somehow, in the backs of the minds of people in influential places, there is the idea that the revolution is temporary, that nonreligious types are going to emerge, and that the Shah is an old friend and we should treat him well. This is very offensive to the revolutionary government because it looks as if we were conspiring to put the Shah back on the throne."

At heart, this argument that the Administration should not have admitted the Shah rests on a cold assessment of U.S. geopolitical needs: it was not worth the price. The opposite argument rests on two different grounds. The first is purely humanitarian. Turning the Shah away would have gone against the American conscience and American history. Dean Rusk, Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of State, makes the same point in broader terms: "When it became clear that the Shah needed serious medical treatment of higher quality, it would have been contrary to world history and tradition not to let him come here." Says a top Administration official: "There was no reasonable alternative. The man was and is very ill."

Yet there were other alternatives. Judging this matter depends partly on a precise medical diagnosis, and the Shah's doctors have not released enough data to allow other physicians to say with certainty just where the Shah's particular type of cancer could be treated, or whether the superb facilities at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center and the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research are really the best in the world for his particular needs. Even so, some U.S. doctors believe the Shah could have received perfectly satisfactory treatment elsewhere. Says one New York cancer specialist: "The Shah's French doctors could have handled the chemotherapy, or doctors from New York could have flown down to Mexico to administer the drugs to the Shah. Medically, it was certainly desirable to bring the Shah to the U.S. for treatment. Every doctor likes to treat patients in his home institution. But as to whether it was necessary to bring the Shah to the U.S., I strongly doubt it."

One factor is the kind of equipment being used to treat the Shah. The tumor in his neck has been bombarded at least three times by radiation generated by a linear accelerator, an expensive and highly sophisticated device, but one that by no means is a monopoly of U.S. medicine. In fact, linear accelerators are available in Mexico.

Regardless of whether the Shah could have received equally good medical treatment outside the U.S., the case for admitting him has a strong diplomatic as well as humanitarian basis. Not only is the U.S. entirely within its legal and moral rights in granting entry to any ailing exile, but its refusal to do so would be widely regarded as an embarrassing abdication of its sovereign power.

The State Department ultimately split on this issue. Its Iran experts--buttressed by warnings from embassy officers in Tehran--firmly argued that the U.S. should not grant the Shah a visa because of the threat to American interests and personnel in Iran. But Secretary of State Vance decided that the U.S. should take in the Shah for humanitarian reasons. The President agreed.

Should the Administration have anticipated Iran's violent reaction to admitting the Shah? With the clarity of hindsight, there is agreement among many experts on this point: a resounding yes. A good deal can be said in Carter's defense, however. Three times the Bazargan government assured the Administration that it could protect the embassy against attack. One of the assurances came after the Shah was admitted to the U.S. and the demonstrators started shouting in Tehran's streets. There was an encouraging precedent. Last February when anti-American protesters seized the embassy, Iran's government moved quickly and efficiently to bring them under control. But the U.S. should have been more aware of how frail the Bazargan government was. The Administration was simply too optimistic, and it did not have sound enough intelligence information.

If the trouble had been correctly anticipated, the U.S. might have closed its embassy. But the Administration reasoned that the risk of maintaining its embassy was worth it. The situation seemed to be in flux, and the Administration felt a U.S. presence in Tehran would act as a moderating force. Besides, the U.S. cannot simply close down its embassies whenever it anticipates trouble.

Once the Administration decided to stay in Iran, it made little sense to try moving the embassy to more defensible quarters. As Carter said last week: "An embassy is not a fortress. There are no embassies anywhere in the world that can long withstand the attack of a mob, if the mob has the support of the host government itself." The U.S. had already greatly reduced the number of personnel affiliated with the embassy, from about 1,500 during the Shah's reign to 73. Fewer staffers would not have been able to maintain normal relations in a country where there were still some 500 Americans and substantial business interests. What was more, the Administration reasoned, reducing personnel to a handful would hardly help. Their capture would be equally outrageous.

The Administration's emergency plans certainly can be criticized on one point: with the demonstrators roaming outside the walls, U.S. personnel should have been able to destroy all documents. The Marine guards held off the mob long enough to enable officials to shred important classified files and smash encoding equipment. No serious security breach is believed to have occurred. But embarrassing documents did fall into the hands of the invaders, and they have been successfully used to inflame mobs in Iran.

In sum, the Administration can be criticized for failing to anticipate the extent of the trouble that would arise, but its actions since the fall of the Shah seem generally to have been prudent and reasonable.

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